The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Foreverby Michael Bungay Stanier (Box of Crayons Press, 2017)​What are the big take-aways?With robust humor, sneaky homages to A.A. Milne, and lots of pithy quotations from a multi-disciplinary array of wits, Michael Bungay Stanier makes one of the strongest (and most practical) arguments I’ve ever heard for why “You Need a Coaching Habit” in your workplace. As the blurb says, “This book gives you seven questions and the tools to make them an everyday way to work less hard and have more impact.”What’s the biggest take-away? The author writes on page 59, “If this were a haiku rather than a book, it would read:Tell less and ask more.Your advice is not as goodAs you think it is.”

What are the big take-aways?Design Thinking is a strategy for solving adaptive challenges by embracing the unknown through a structured five-step process. I have recently encountered Design Thinking in several contexts, including in the MiddCORE program sponsored by Middlebury College’s Center for Creativity, Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship – where I taught leadership development as an Alumni Mentor a couple of weeks ago – and by participating in a superb Vermont-ATD workshop that offered an introductory hands-on experience of the method’s five steps (empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test). Also, Design Thinking was the centerpiece of Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, which I reviewed for this blog in December.

After a brief break to enjoy our short summer season, we kicked off our fall programs in September with a SIG on Effective Pre-Training activities. Facilitated by Melinda Friedlander and Talia Glesner from the Vermont ATD board, the session drew out great insights and helpful tips from an energetic and engaged group.

​The session’s activities and discussion were based around an article the facilitators sent out as pre-work (see what they did there?) 6 Ways to Make Pre-Work Compelling by Danuta McCall and Julia Young of Facilitate.com. It outlines six essential considerations for when and how to assign pre-training activities, including: ensure pre-work adds value, create a sense of urgency, provide incentives, make it fun, implement accountability, and build a communication plan.

Welcome to summer!It’s a perfect season to shift into a more relaxed gear, schedule in some fun, and catch up on reading a few good books. It seems like everyone is promoting their new book these days. My 30-year-old son recently queried: what about reading the books that already exist?I must admit, he has a good point.​The tricky part may be deciding what to read. Here are a few of my recent, renewed favorites:

“I’m so good that I’m replaceable……” – I must admit, this headline from a recently published blog on LinkedIn by a C-level executive named Rudolph Rosenberg, really caught my attention.

Mr. Rosenberg’s central question is whether you should “make yourself irreplaceable, center to key processes and sole holder of high value knowledge or should you do the exact opposite and make yourself as replaceable as possible by organizing processes, knowledge and power so that people could wonder if you’re actually needed for things to run smoothly?”

In October 2014 I published a blog entitledLet’s Ban Multitasking. It was filled with advice (from high up on my soapbox) about how we should eliminate distractibility that inevitably arises when we multitask in favor of adopting a singular focus. The examples cited were all from the workplace – don’t multitask in meetings, don’t document multitasking as a required skill in job descriptions, etc. I still stand by these suggestions –and I make a conscious effort to apply this logic to increase my effectiveness as situations present themselves.

Last month, we learned through theSimultaneity Principlehow impactful our questions can be in shaping our reality. Now we’ll look into the power of images with the Anticipatory Principle, #4 of the five main Appreciative Inquiry principles.​

This post could be enough of a brain workout if you only practiced pronouncing the word “simultaneity”! Try it: si-mul-ta-ne-ity, again, simul-tane-ity, simultaneity. Let’s consider that a sufficient warm up and delve deeper into the Simultaneity Principle, the third principle of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), following the Constructionist Principle, and the Poetic Principle (on which we've previously published blogs).

Welcome back to our Appreciative Inquiry (AI) journey. If you’ve missed it,our first blog introduced us to the Constructionist Principle, which reminds us that our reality is the one we create for ourselves, it is not one and the same for all of us. In this post, we discover the second principle of AI, the Poetic Principle, which takes this idea a step further.

Just like we keep our bodies healthy with regular exercise, why not get our brain in shape? You may be familiar withself-fulling prophecies, thePlacebo effect, or theHalo effect. All are well researched tricks that our brain plays on us such that our beliefs directly impact our reality. Appreciative Inquiry(AI) - a philosophy, a methodology, and truly, a way of life - builds on the plasticity of our brain to do just that: develop positive mind muscles. AI is made of 5 core principles: The Constructionist Principle, the Poetic Principle, the Simultaneity Principle, the Anticipatory Principle, and the Positive Principle. In this blog, we’ll delve into the fundamentals of The Constructionist Principle.

Daylight savings time came to town this weekend, signaling a shift in the seasons and shining a light on new possibilities. Longer days and warmer temperatures are perfect for rethinking stale habits and rebuilding lost boundaries. Try one (or all) of these hacks for a week and watch yourself spring into wellbeing:

Rooted in Robert Kegan’s theory of adult development, Berger and Johnston describe “habits of mind” that help leaders move forward in the midst of our global VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) conditions. How do leaders not just survive but thrive in unknown and ever-changing territory? The authors advise leaders to “engage with complexity, but keep it simple” and “grow your people to be bigger than your problems” by supporting them in their own developmental journeys. The three primary habits of mind which the authors prescribe for increasing individual and organizational capacity for complexity are: (1) asking different questions, (2) taking multiple perspectives, and (3) seeing systems.

A virtual instructor-led training (VILT) event can be a powerful and economical tool for supplementing the benefits of traditional learning for your employees. Yet doing it right requires a keen grasp of the technological underpinnings of VILT, adequate preparation on the part of both instructor and students, and the organization’s support — particularly in terms of available resources and encouragement to participate.

Star Trek: Next Generation fans remember episodes that included an alien race called the Borg in which their stock phrase was “Resistance is futile” where they would assimilate other cultures into their world forcing them to become part Borg. I think they were right in that generally resistance is futile. In my experience, there really isn’t a way to stop the sensation or feeling of not wanting to comply or accept something. When resistance (a force that opposes or slows down motion) arises, it is difficult to prevent the energy from taking over us and halting the ease and flow.

Is This Seat Taken?: It's Never Too Late To Find The Right Seat by Kristin S. Kaufman (Greenleaf, 2015)What are the big take-aways?My friend and classmate from Georgetown University’s Leadership Coaching Program, Kristin Kaufman, offers in her second book a collection of fifteen profiles of Americans whose greatest achievements came later in life. They include the painter Grandma Moses, McDonalds Restaurant co-founder Ray Kroc, Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, and long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad. The overarching message is “it is never too late” to find your purpose and follow a dream. Most of the men and women, alive and dead, who Kristin profiles in this book made their major “legacy” contributions after age 50, and some in their 70s and 80s.

Many of us will have time off during the holidays, but will we really take a break? Despite being out of the office, 44% of us will be checking work email during vacation. Instead of that, be part of the 56% who unplug and take a real breather. Try one of these easy ways to take the first step:

After facilitating a change leadership and resilience workshop last week, I took a much-needed opportunity to stop and self-reflect. This got me thinking, “Wow, talk about change! This year, more than ever, was all about change for me, personally. I’ve got a new role, in a new location, and am living in a different city, in a different home, with a new look towards the future. Even beyond that, I noticed the changes that may not have directly been happening in my life or to me, but were happening all around me. The news, for example, was all about change: changing economics, changing climate, changes in pop culture, the Olympics and, of course, the election. ​

We have only to consult our experience to know that our leaders’ and co-workers’ moods and outlooks affect us. My colleague Cheryl radiates sunshine and hope; they “power” her life. During a year-long collaboration, I marveled at her earnest friendliness, genuine curiosity about others, and often-expressed appreciation. When we faced challenges, her hope buoyed me.

If you do a search for “ongoing performance management trend,” you’ll get roughly 1.5 million results going back quite a few years. It’s a theme that continues to catch on from small businesses to global powerhouse companies looking to revamp their approach to talent management, moving away from annual appraisals to something more in tune with the pace of the business.And this trend towards ongoing performance management is catching on because it works. Consider this excerpt from Willis Towers Watson’s paper, The Power of Three:

I'm curious how many of you are familiar with the acronym V.U.C.A.? It stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. I've referenced it in a number of blog posts in the past couple of years, and I've even been prone to incorporate it into performance reviews to provide additional context when coaching employees where emotional intelligence is or should be a focus. When feeling nostalgic for "simpler" times, I've tended to recall the 90's version of my professional self as a "people person," as a "multi-tasker" in the 2000's, and currently a "change agent" on flight 63 to VUCA-land.

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Founded in 1990, the Vermont Chapter of the Association for Talent Development (formerly the American Society for Training & Development) has provided over twenty years of service to Vermont's dedicated organizational training and development professionals. Thanks to the on-going support of our volunteers, presenters and Chapter Board, our local ATD Chapter remains vital and growing.